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Artist Statement

My series Entwine is composed of large-scale watercolor paintings on paper. Through the Roof is part of this series. The "roof" is a section of a 1920s latticework pavilion at the rose garden in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It focuses on architectural detail, similar to my approach to interiors in another series, Chambers. The shadows and highlights of the rafters are painted in fiery yellows and oranges. The blazing hot colors contrast with an eerily magenta sky on a hot and humid Brooklyn summer day. My eyes are magnetically drawn to subjects like Georgian interiors at a 1760s mansion in Philadelphia or formal landscapes at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Besides a personal interest in American history and flower gardening, these places and spaces provide the panoply of design elements, patterns and compositions with which to play. My color palettes are imaginary (not realistic). The manipulated perspectives look slightly outside of the realm of the real world. Ultimately, my mind's eye sees the destination for the content in my paintings as an abstraction.

After graduate school and an almost-two-decade job at the New York design firm Smart Design (famous for OXO Good Grips kitchen gadgets), Tamara immersed herself in her artwork in 1999. Her BFA and MFA degrees were in painting, and recent large-scale interiors and landscape watercolor paintings reflect a return to this first proclivity as an artist. In the last decade, participation in open studios through artist organizations in Brooklyn provided exposure for her work to enthusiastic local audiences. Group exhibitions in 2010 (NURTUREart, Brooklyn Navy Yard Arts) and activity on sites like 20x200, as well as inquiries about work on her website, have all generated positive feedback and new collectors of her work. Tamara Thomsen lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her studio is at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard. She was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1953.